Medicaid expansion saved lives

We use large-scale federal survey data linked to administrative death records to investigate the relationship between Medicaid enrollment and mortality. Our analysis compares changes in mortality for near-elderly adults in states with and without Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions. We identify adults most likely to benefit using survey information on socioeconomic and citizenship status, and public program participation.

We find a 0.13 percentage point decline in annual mortality, a 9.3 percent reduction over the sample mean, associated with Medicaid expansion for this population. The effect is driven by a reduction in disease-related deaths and grows over time. We find no evidence of differential pre-treatment trends in outcomes and no effects among placebo groups.

Sarah Miller Sean Altekruse Norman Johnson Laura R. Wherry, NBER WP Working Paper 26081

I’ve been waiting for this. ACA Medicaid expansion is a policy experiment. The states which did not expand Medicaid made it easy to see if Medicaid saves lives. Obviously it does.

Via Axios where Sam Baker wrote; “expansion states saw a mortality rate that’s about 0.2% lower than nonexpansion states, the authors write — which would translate to roughly 15,600 lives, had the expansion not been optional for states.”

So Republican reactionary idiots have killed roughly 15,600 people so far through refusal to expand Medicaid alone. For comparison “In 2017, the estimated number of murders in the nation was 17,284” (just a number for comparison, I am not saying Republican legislators are murderers).

I don’t read Axios. I clicked there from Steve Benen